How Mike Pence Became a Conservative Hero: Unwavering Opposition to Abortion

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A nun was arrested during an anti-abortion protest in 2009 at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. As governor of Indiana, Mike Pence signed into law a sweeping set of restrictions on abortion that some say went further than any state in the country.CreditScott Olson/Getty Images

One by one, Republican women of the Indiana state legislature rose to describe, in anguished terms, why they could not support an anti-abortion measure hurtling toward passage.

They hated abortion, they said, but this bill went too far. It would have prohibited a woman from aborting a fetus because it had a disability, such as Down syndrome.

Representative Holli Sullivan called it a “dangerous” plan that could compel women to lie to their doctors. Her colleague Wendy McNamara warned of a return to “back-room abortions.” Another, Cindy Ziemke, said it was a case of government overreach.

“It’s a sad day for me to have to vote no on a pro-life bill,” Ms. Ziemke said in emotional remarks in March. “I have never had to do that before. I never thought I would ever have to.”

Indiana’s governor, Mike Pence, waved off the objections of his fellow Republicans: He signed the legislation into law a few weeks later, enacting what advocates and foes agree was a sweeping and unusual set of restrictions on abortion that went further than any other state in the country and openly clashed with legal precedent.

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Protesters at a rally for women’s rights in April in front of the Capitol in Indianapolis.CreditMykal Mceldowney/The Indianapolis Star, via Associated Press

Mr. Pence’s reputation as a longstanding, implacable and dogged opponent of abortion has made him a hero to the country’s cultural conservatives. Now that he is Donald J. Trump’s running mate, it puts him at odds with the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and could complicate the party’s outreach to a decisive bloc of voters in the general election: women.

Mr. Pence may be best known for embracing a different conservative cause — his support for a controversial 2015 law that could have made it easier for religious people to refuse service to gay couples.

But to a powerful network of grass-roots activists, Mr. Pence’s most enduring legacy is his unbending battle against abortion and his repeated willingness to test the boundaries of the law in seeking to limit it.

The same cannot be said for Mr. Trump. In 1999, he described himself as “very pro-choice” on abortion, and for years, he has donated to numerous candidates who were ardent supporters of abortion rights. It was not until 2011, when he flirted with running for president, that he switched positions. He now declares himself opposed to it, “with caveats.”

Mr. Pence, an evangelical Christian who is fond of quoting Scripture, is a lifelong abortion foe, and put the issue at the center of his career in Congress, where he represented southern Indiana for 12 years. He sponsored one of the first bills to deny federal funds to Planned Parenthood in 2007 and pressed for similar efforts year after year, summoning words of outrage but having little effect.

“It is my ambition, from time to time to time, to come onto this blue-and-gold carpet of this Capitol and speak to my colleagues, and anyone else who may be listening, on the moral and intellectual and historical arguments for the sanctity of human life,” he said in a 2003 speech on the floor of the House.

He radiated anger over the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States, Roe v. Wade, calling it in 2009 “the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott,” which found in 1857 that black slaves were property and not citizens.

And he repeatedly evoked what he said was the evil of the procedure itself — “nascent human life that is ended abruptly and in darkness.”

Since his election as governor, in 2012, he has signed anti-abortion measures every year he has been in office. Most copied the language of conservative state laws around the country, which made it harder for abortion clinics to operate and put new demands on women seeking the procedures, according to abortion rights advocates.

Under the bill, Indiana would have been the first state to broadly ban abortions based solely on a fetus’s race, on its sex or on its suspected disabilities — and impose penalties on doctors who violate the rules. Other states, like North Dakota, have banned abortions for some of those reasons, but Indiana’s was more expansive. It touched on the information a doctor must give, the counseling a woman must receive and the handling of fetal tissue. It required that abortion providers bury or cremate fetuses. Traditionally, they disposed of them as medical waste.

“It went broader than any of us thought a law like this could possibly go,” said Elizabeth Nash, who monitors state laws for the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. She called the Indiana measure “the most restrictive of these types of abortion laws.”

The law was a surprise even to many of the lawmakers who passed it. A less far-reaching bill had made it through the Indiana House before more extensive provisions, agreed to in the Senate, were tacked on for final approval. Some lawmakers, including the Republican women, said they were stunned by what they saw as a rushed process.

But State Senator Travis Holdman, a Republican who said he introduced the provision banning abortions because of genetic abnormalities after conferring with local Right to Life officials, said the legislative process was not out of the ordinary. Mr. Holdman said he did not confer with Mr. Pence over the bill, but he knew the governor’s history when it came to abortion. “I was assuming he would be supportive,” he said.

“To say you’re not worth anything to society so we’re going to basically kill you so we don’t have to deal with the expense that you’re going to bring when you’re born — I find that abhorrent,” Mr. Holdman said.

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Donald J. Trump, then the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, announcing Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana as his vice-presidential running mate.Published OnJuly 15, 2016CreditImage by Damon Winter/The New York Times

The number of women who abort fetuses after receiving a diagnosis of Down syndrome has been a concern for people in the anti-abortion movement. Though estimates vary on the precise number, a broad review of research published in the journal Prenatal Diagnosis in 2012 showed that an overwhelming majority of women chose to terminate such pregnancies.

The outcry from opponents of the Indiana law, which Mr. Pence signed in March, was immediate and furious.

Angry protesters, many of them women, marched on the Capitol, bearing sarcastic signs that mocked the governor as a repressive, fatherlike figure from a bygone era. “Set your clocks back 43 years,” read one. “We will not go quietly back into the 1950s,” declared another.

In a campaign of phone calls and online postings, called “Periods for Pence,” women who felt the latest law infringed on deeply personal decisions mockingly gave the governor’s office jarringly personal updates on their menstrual cycle. If state law ventured this far into their lives, organizers asked, who knew what Indiana officials would demand to know next? “Started my cycle today,” one woman told Mr. Pence in a Twitter post. Another wrote: “Perimenopausal bleeding happening now in South Bend. Some heavy flow, I tell you, Pence. Thanks so much for your concern!”

The constitutionality of the measure was in question, given longstanding Supreme Court rulings on abortion, a fact that even its supporters readily conceded. And in late June, a day before the law was to take effect, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against it. “How can it be described as anything but a prohibition on the right to an abortion?” asked Judge Tanya Walton Pratt of Federal District Court for Southern Indiana.

The State of Indiana is considering whether to appeal the ruling, and anti-abortion groups are lobbying the governor’s office to do so.

The legal setback seemed of little worry to Mr. Pence.

For the governor, who was facing a tight re-election fight before he was selected as Mr. Trump’s running mate, the episode was a well-timed political boon. He had stood up for religious conservatives, who had carried him into office, at a moment when many of them seemed to doubt the depth of his allegiance to them.

Mr. Pence’s embrace of the 2015 law that could allow religious conservatives to decline services to gay couples had set off a national firestorm, and no group seemed angrier with his response to the fallout than social conservatives.

To them, the governor’s decision to revise the law to satisfy Indiana’s politically moderate business leaders felt like an unexpected betrayal from a man who promised never to compromise his values. “It was a mistake,” said Curt Smith, the president of the Indiana Family Institute, a conservative group, who had worked behind the scenes to keep the law’s original language. “I was very disappointed.”

The abortion law was a chance for Mr. Pence to repair those strained bonds. And the governor seemed to tailor his message to those supporters when the bill reached his desk, showcasing his Christian values and abiding faith.

“I sign this legislation,” he announced after the bill signing, “with a prayer that God would continue to bless these precious children, mothers and families.”

It seemed to work. Conservative groups rushed to his defense and have showered him with praise. A local chapter of Indiana Right to Life, a group opposed to abortion, plans to give Mr. Pence its annual “Courage Award” for his work on the law.

“Pro-lifers are very proud of the work he has done on this,” said Jeanette Burdell, the executive director St. Joseph County Right to Life.

Even his foes on the issue grudgingly acknowledge his single-mindedness, which they say outstrips his passion for issues like the religious exceptions law, which has defined his time as governor. “That was one thing, but this — abortion — has been his mission in life,” said Representative Linda Lawson, a Democrat.